Not at the table, dear

Erstwhile breakfast TV rivals Sir David Frost and Nick Ross were reunited at a Royal Television Society lunch on Monday looking back at the launch, 30 years ago, of breakfast television in the UK. Frost, one of TV-am's "famous five", was generous in his praise of BBC1's Breakfast Time which, until Roland Rat came on the scene, ate TV-am for breakfast. "It was pretty damn good straight away," recalled Frost. "The sweater [as modelled by Frank Bough et al] was a mega revolution. We rushed out to buy sweaters. They found a shorthand for what we were all trying to do." Ross, one of the original Breakfast Time presenters, was less gushing, more forthright. "Your mistakes weren't technical or union problems or the right computers," he told Frost. "You confused, as I would have done, authority with pomposity. It was actually a rather earnest programme and it was wrong for that time of day." Frost appeared to agree, recalling an Anna Ford interview in TV-am's early days about female circumcision. "It is not breakfast fodder of any kind," he admitted. Former Breakfast Time producer Colin Stanbridge said Ford's interview was legendary in BBC circles. "When I saw eight and a half minutes on female circumcision, I thought that's it, we're home and dry," said Stanbridge. "It became the thing we all referred to, that was the one item where we went, 'they have lost it, there's no way we can lose' … Of course, the BBC made sure we lost in the end."

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Still at the RTS breakfast lunch (brunch?), it is reassuring to know, in the light of the BBC's £100m Digital Media Initiative fiasco, that some things never change. Rewind 30 years and BBC Breakfast was the first computerised newsroom in the BBC, Stanbridge recalled. Except they didn't work properly and churned out "gobbledegook" instead. It was particularly frustrating, said Stanbridge, when you were trying to write a script at 2am. The original concept for the BBC's breakfast programme was not Breakfast Time at all, but a TV equivalent of Radio 4's Today, something grandly titled "Radiovision", which fortunately never got off the ground.

He Taurus a new one

The then BBC director general, Alasdair Milne, was famously opposed to Russell Grant's astrology slot, and it fell to its first editor, Ron Neil, and producer Stanbridge to keep him at bay. "One of my jobs was to prevent the then director general from seeing Russell," remembered Stanbridge. "He phoned Ron at least five or six times a day saying 'take that astrologer off the air.' The idea of having an astrologer but no God spot was phenomenal within the BBC, it was a huge point, but Ron stuck to his guns, we all stuck to our guns." There followed the story, perhaps apocryphal, of the time Milne exploded into a rant about the Breakfast Time astrology spot only for Neil to stop him mid-steam – so he could listen to Grant tell his horoscope.